Intel Arc Alchemist DG2 GPUs To Feature Support For Up To 5 Displays, Could Be For Workstation Lineup

Intel Xe-HPG DG2 GPU Powered Gaming Discrete Graphics Card

The Intel i915 Linux graphics driver acquired a patch recently that allows for 5th display support for Intel's DG2 GPU series, also known as the ARC Alchemist discrete GPUs. Intel plans to release the new GPUs for laptops and desktop computers. The anticipated date of release should be near Q2 2022.

The Linux i915 driver notes show no explanation of the ARC Alchemist line offering support for up to five displays. The new line has never appeared to support five individual displays in any previous photos. However, with the introduction of USB4, Intel may use USB-C ports for additional display support. The previous photos leaked online only show DisplayPort or HDMI connectivity.

Currently, NVIDIA and AMD are only capable of supporting four displays. The Gigabyte AORUS series made endeavors to add additional connections to the gaming graphics card line, but the additional connectivity is reserved for virtual reality headsets (PCVR).

Intel to offer 5th display support would be a definitive move for its technologies due to AMD offering six mini DisplayPorts on their Radeon PRO W6800 graphics card. The AMD Radeon PRO W6800 graphics card features 32 GB of GDDR6 memory running across a 256-bit bus interface at 16 Gbps pin speeds for a total of 512 GB/s bandwidth. In addition to that, there is also 128 MB of Infinity Cache. The Radeon PRO offers a full FP32 performance of 17.83 TFLOPs, FP16 performance of 35.66 TFLOPs, & 1.11 TFLOPs of FP64 performance.

Intel's Arch Alchemist's compute block comprises 16 Vector Engines (256-bit per engine) and 16 Matrix Engines (1024-bit per engine). Each Vector Engine is composed of 8 ALUs or 128 ALUs per Xe-Core. Each Matrix Engine block is also referred to as an XMX block that will operate tensor operations in FP16 and INT8 modes. The Xe-Core additionally features its own dedicated L1 cache.

Speculation has arisen that Intel plans to implement its DG2 GPUs in enterprise workstations, but Intel has not verified this information recently. We anticipate more information as we inch closer to release, possibly during this year's PAX East which would be mere weeks before the estimated release.

News Sources: Phoronix, Videocardz